Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Tribute to Shree Shankar Sharan

  3 July 2011

  Retired IAS officer of the Bihar cadre and Convener of Lok Paksh, Patna/Delhi Shree Shankar Sharan (who was earlier the President of the Awami Ekta Manch, Patna/Delhi) passed away at Gurgaon’s Paras Hospital at 8 pm on June 18; he would have completed 80 years on August 7. He is survived by his wife, a daughter and three sons.
  He was related to Lal Bahadur Shastri, our second PM, from his mother’s side whereas Jayaprakash Narayan (‘JP’ to one and all) happened to be his great grandfather’s (…)

• Losers and Winners in Obama’s Afghanistan

  3 July 2011, by M K Bhadrakumar

  United States President Barack Obama never fails to rise to the occasion when rhetorical flourish is the need of the hour. By that yardstick, the drawdown speech on June 22 in Washington that he thoughtfully titled “On the Way Forward in Afghanistan”, has been more a programmatic speech than intended to stir up the mind. His judgment is correct that the occasion is not one of celebration but of justification for what is to be done about something that went horribly wrong.
  There are (…)

• Will Green Kerala Express become All-India Express?

  3 July 2011

  [The following article reached us quite sometime ago when the State Government of the LDF was in power in Kerala. But it could not be used earlier for unavoidable reasons. —Editor]
  by ANAND MATHEW
  Prabhakaran, the proud president of Vellamunda gram panchayat in Wayanad district of Kerala, maintains a stoic equanimity and replies in an unrehearsed manner when asked probing questions from the informed gathering. The audience applauds often and even the jury seems impressed. Set amidst the (…)

• China’s India War — How the Chinese Saw the Conflict

  3 July 2011

  [The author of India’s China War (1970), Neville Maxwell is a well-known specialist of the history of Sino-Indian border conflict. He was for eight years the Times correspondent in India. We are publishing, as a point of view, this article he specially sent to Mainstream. His earlier article—“The Pre-history of the Sino-Indian Border Dispute: A Note”—appeared in this journal’s February 12, 2011 issue. In a note to the editor Maxwell has written: “Please understand it (the following article) (…)

• CPI-M, Now An Apologist Of Neo-Liberalism, Faces A Bleak Future

  3 July 2011, by Barun Das Gupta

  BOOK REVIEW
  WITH INTELLECTUAL PAUCITY, LACK OF CONVICTION, RANK OPPORTUNISM
  BARUN DAS GUPTA
  Understanding CPI-M: Will the Indian Left Survive? by Diptendra Raychaudhuri; Vitasta Publishing Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi; Rs 595.
  The book, written before the debacle of the Left Front in West Bengal and the defeat of the LDF in Kerala, both led by the CPI-M, is one that helps understand the changing character of the Left in India and the direction it is taking. The book begins with the (…)

• Promise of a New Future for Bengal and Tamil Nadu, but not Kerala

  3 July 2011, by T J S George

  Opportunity has been called “thou strong seducer”. From A. Raja to B. S. Yeddyurappa, from the Bengal Communists to the UPA-II high commanders, they have all allowed opportunity to seduce them. Which is a pity because opportunity is also a provider of inspiration for great and noble work.
  Following the recent Assembly elections, three States saw historically significant regime changes. How are the novice Chief Minister in Bengal and the veterans in Tamil Nadu and Kerala using their (…)

• No Alternative

  28 June 2011, by SC

  “The government’s attitude in the nine meetings (of the Lokpal Bill drafting committee) indicated that they are not willing to root out corruption,” said Anna Hazare spearheading the civil society crusade for an effective Lokpal with the aim of eradicating corruption, at a press conference in the Capital on June 22. He also made it abundantly clear that the civil society’s proposed Lokpal, as upheld in its draft of the Bill, was not in the least an attempt to foist a parallel government as (…)

• Subverting Right To Information — The Sarkari Way

  28 June 2011

  by SHOBHA AGGARWAL
  June 15 marked the sixth anniversary of the President’s assent to the Right to Information Act, 2005. The following article is an attempt to evaluate the efficacy of this Act. Having filed over 500 RTI applications in the last six years, the Public Interest Litigation Watch Group (of which the author is the Joint Secretary) is sharing with our readers the fate of one such RTI application.
  Outraged at the loot of the exchequer under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban (…)

• Towards Post-Kemalism: An Analysis of The Turkish General Elections 2011

  28 June 2011, by Arshi Khan

  The electoral verdict in the 16th Turkish general elections, held on June 12, 2011, indicates a major shift in the evolutionary and transitional Turkish representative democracy replacing the focus and priority from the ‘privileged’ to the ‘public’ and from the ‘state’ to the ‘society’. The verdict has bolstered the feelings of foreign investors and market-friendly actors. Throughout his campaign, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, mobilised voters over (…)

• Children Show the Way

  28 June 2011, by S G Vombatkere

  The people and especially the children of Dhinkia, Gadkujang, Govindpur and Nuagaon villages in Jagatsinghpur district in Odisha have shown the nation how people matter over the governments’ plans for development of business corporations at their cost. The children “illegally” lay down on the hot earth under in the blazing summer heat and refused to move to allow entry to government officials to take over forest land and their villages for the POSCO mega-project. This was in the face of (…)